Between Dawn and Permanence

"Between Dawn and Permanence" explores Bruno Silva’s prolonged relationship with Coimbra, a Portuguese university city he repeatedly returned to over the last decade, through fragments, memory, experience and experimentation.

Between Dawn and Permanence brings together photographic works developed by Bruno Silva through a prolonged relationship with Coimbra, a Portuguese city widely known for its historic university and student life. The artist lived in Coimbra during his early years of photography and has returned to the city repeatedly over the last decade, making it a recurring subject and a place of personal, photographic and artistic experience.

The project brings together images made at different moments, from the artist’s early photographic years to work developed between 2018 and 2022 and more recent photographs produced during an artistic residency. Rather than attempting to construct a definitive portrait of the city, the work emerges from repeated walks, returns and encounters with the same places. The photographs operate as fragments of a prolonged relationship with Coimbra, where memory, experience and experimentation intersect, allowing the city to be approached not as a fixed subject, but as a territory continually transformed by time and by the act of looking.